All That Is Buried

by Robert Scragg

  He peeled back the foil on a pouch of food that didn’t need the pictures of salmon on the front to give away the contents. Porter wrinkled his nose as he slid it into Demetrious’s bowl. He pulled a sweet and sour chicken ready meal from the fridge for himself. Bachelor cuisine at its finest. He’d not eaten since lunchtime, and it barely touched the sides. It was tempting to double up and throw a second one in the microwave, but he fought the urge, and trudged through to bed instead.

  The search had taken its toll on his feet; the visit to Ally Hallforth had done the same on his mind. He and Holly had talked about starting a family. No idea if that was on Simmons’s agenda. Way too soon to know if he was ready to consider it with anyone else himself. All the same, he knew the last five months must have been some of the hardest a parent could face. The lack of resolution, the not knowing what had happened to your baby girl. Whether or not she was still out there. And after all that heartache, they might well have their closure now, in the most brutally public way.

  He climbed into bed, hitting the pillow like a puppet with its strings cut, breathing slowing. His eyes snapped back open. Twisting around, he slid his bedside drawer open and saw her looking up at him. A photo from their wedding. Holly scooped up in his arms, one hand around his neck, the other stretching out to wave at the photographer. He’d stashed it here the first night Simmons stayed over. Feeling guilty on both fronts: that he’d felt the need to move it, but didn’t want her to feel conscious of Holly staring at them.

  He stared at it, floating back to that moment. Feeling her weight in his arms. The squeaky sound she made when he pretended to drop her. Porter lifted the frame out, traced a finger across her face, then carefully set it back on the bedside table, watching her watching him. Feeling the heaviness in his eyes. Seeing her face. The last thing on his mind before it all faded to black.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  He’s been staring at the screen so long that when he blinks, fireflies star his vision. Sometimes he can bring himself to turn the volume up, but today isn’t one of those. Today is one of his black days. Storm clouds gather in his head, a vortex of emotion so confusing that it hurts to try and make sense of it all.

  The children rolling around on the TV screen are rosy-cheeked, padded coats and hair dusted with snow. The girl throws a snowball that hits the boy square in the face. He blinks in surprise, stunned for the briefest of seconds, before he roars a silent challenge back at her, scooping a double handful of powdery snow and charging towards her. The girl shrieks and turns to run. Even without sound, it echoes in his mind from the dozens of times he has watched before. It soothes him. A visual comfort blanket to ward off bad thoughts.

  The boy is younger than her, but big for his age, and he catches her within ten feet, barging into her and knocking her to the ground, scrubbing snow into her hair and face. He can’t help but smile, despite the darkness of his mood, at the sheer childish fun of it all, remembering it as if it were yesterday. Feeling the cold breeze sting his cheeks, numbing his fingers as he’d tried to keep the camera steady.

  Then she comes into shot, and his hands grip the armrests reflexively, fingers digging into material hard enough to make the tips tingle. He swings from love to hate, and back again. He repeats the mantra.

  It’s my fault. All of it.

  He’s not sure any more whether that’s true. Can’t remember what it was he did, though the feeling of guilt weighs heavy as any anchor. There’s a veil across it all, blocking his view whenever he tries to look back. She’s the mother of his children. She’s also the reason he lost them. The one who took them away. The one who can give them back. He still loves her. Doesn’t mean to say he hasn’t thought about making her feel an ounce of his pain. He’ll do what he has to, though, to get them all back. Swallow his pride. Do whatever it takes.

  He thinks back to the fairground, picturing the look on the girl’s face as he walked towards her. Confusion in her voice as he took her hand. Fear in her eyes as he reached out a hand to stop her calling out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Porter did a double take at the empty seat beside him, before he remembering Styles wasn’t in until ten. Plenty to keep him occupied in the meantime. First on his list was a call to the pathologist, see what favours could be called in to fast-track the autopsy.

  ‘I’m good, but even I’m not that good,’ said Dr Isabella Jakobsdottir.

  ‘Don’t sell yourself short, Bella,’ Porter said, dropping formality in favour of the shortened version. ‘You don’t even know what I’m going to say yet.’

  ‘You’re not going to say anything,’ she shot back. ‘You’re going to ask, and no, I haven’t started yet.’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Your rush-job from yesterday. DS Styles caught me working late last night, and said he’d buy my lunch for a week if it jumped to the front of the queue.’

  Not what he’d expected, and he made a mental note to add a drink to Styles’s tab.

  ‘Well, strictly speaking he said you’d be doing the buying,’ she continued, ‘but let’s not split hairs. Anyway, it’ll be done before lunch. Perfect timing when you think about it, seeing as you’ll be buying.’

  Porter agreed to turn up at noon, sandwich in hand. He scanned the office. A few of the faces from yesterday’s park search were milling about. Quick check of the watch. Another forty-five minutes until Styles arrived. Made sense to go ahead with the morning briefing, and he could bring him up to speed when he got here. He stood up to round up Tessier, Williams and the others, but dropped back into his seat as his desk phone rang. He recognised the voice as Annette from the front desk.

  ‘Got a fella here to see you, DI Porter. Have you got two minutes?’

  ‘Not really,’ he said, huffing at the timing. ‘He give a name?’

  ‘Uh-uh.’ Sounded like she was sipping from a cup between every sentence.

  ‘Did he at least say what it’s about?’

  ‘Mmm.’ Another swallow. ‘Didn’t actually ask for you by name,’ she said cryptically. ‘Asked for whoever was in charge of the Libby Hallforth case.’

  Porter rolled his eyes, knowing what was most likely coming. High-profile cases tended to tease all sorts out of the woodwork. People who’d confess to killing Kennedy if you caught them on the right day. They usually called up, but there were always walk-ins too. He thought fast, preferring to get the briefing done, tasks allocated and the team sent scurrying off to turn over rocks.

  ‘Tell him I’m heading into a meeting. I’ll send someone down to take his statement.’

  ‘I think you might want to speak to him yourself,’ she said, lowering her voice, as if he was standing right next to her, eavesdropping. ‘He’s insisting it’s got to be the person in charge. He’s got a little girl with him.’

  Porter took the stairs two at a time, four floors down, thoughts skittering around his head, breathing fast. The majority of kids who went missing turned up within days, not months. Those that stretched out that long didn’t tend to end well. And what? Now she’d just strolled into the station? Who the hell was the man she was with?

  He reached the bottom of the stairwell and marched through the door into the reception area. A row of four hard plastic chairs lined the wall, all unoccupied. Annette looked startled when he appeared, putting a palm to her chest in surprise.

  ‘Made me jump. You must have slid down the bannister, did you?’

  ‘Where are they?’ Porter asked, offering a quick smile to acknowledge her joke.

  ‘Just stepped outside. He said he’d be right back, though.’

  ‘And you just let him walk out?’ he snapped, heading for the door.

  She frowned. ‘I couldn’t exactly force him to stay, could I? Whoever he is, he’s here voluntarily.’

  She was right, of course, and he’d apologise for being snappy in a minute, but for now he had to find them. Had to see for Libby for himself. Outside the main entrance, a short flight of stairs led down to street level. Empty. Traf
fic grumbled past, bumper to bumper. Morning commuters strode past, earphones in, heads down, both for some, but no sign of a man and young girl. He looked frantically left and right, and did a double take back towards Edgware Road Tube station. A ramp led away from the entrance, and halfway down it a man stood, back propped against the wall. Not a face he recognised. He was eyes down on his phone, and hadn’t noticed Porter yet. Nothing remarkable about him. Forties maybe, jeans and jumper, well-groomed sharp-edged beard.

  Porter moved towards him, catching a flash of red, someone hidden behind him. The man must have heard him come out, sensed him at least, and looked around, straightening up as he clocked Porter’s hard stare.

  ‘You’re the detective from the telly,’ he said: a statement, not a question.

  It took Porter a second to process, but then he remembered he’d been in the background as Amy Fitzwilliam had broadcast from the park. The man half-turned, reaching an arm behind him, guiding out a young girl. Around seven or eight years old. Postbox-red coat. Blonde hair scraped back into a ponytail. Porter blinked, doing another double take. Could literally have been the girl from their reconstruction.

  Not Libby, though. His brain, bumped off kilter by the resemblance, clicked back into gear. Like her, but not her. Not quite. He breathed out, heavy, disappointed.

  ‘DI Jake Porter. And you are?’

  ‘Bruce,’ the man said, extending his hand. ‘Bruce Green. This is my daughter, Abigail.’

  The girl looked uncomfortable, like she’d rather be anywhere but here. Thoughts zipped around Porter’s head, bashing off each other, like flies against a window. This made no sense. It wasn’t as if they were auditioning for lookalikes. All the same, he gave the girl a reassuring smile.

  ‘And what can I do for you, Mr Green?’

  ‘This is, uhm, well it’s quite embarrassing really,’ he said. ‘All that fuss on the news yesterday. The missing girl. Thing is, we were in the park,’ he said, letting a hand fall on his daughter’s shoulder. ‘I didn’t even know anything about it until this morning, but I’m wondering if it was maybe Abigail that this lady saw. I’d hate to have been the cause of this, and, you know, got people’s hopes up.’

  Porter studied Abigail Green’s face as her father spoke. She was probably closer to the girl they’d used in the reconstruction than Libby herself, in the shape of her nose and cheekbones. Still, there was no denying the resemblance. Could yesterday’s search have all been a wild goose chase?

  ‘What time were you there?’ he asked.

  ‘I’d say about noon,’ Bruce Green replied, looking genuinely embarrassed. ‘We only had a wander through for an ice cream. Abbs here wandered off while I was paying. It was at that cafe near the lake.’

  ‘Why didn’t you get in touch yesterday?’ Porter asked, thinking of how many officers had combed the park all day, late into the afternoon. The wasted hours. Having said that, if they hadn’t searched the park, they might not have found the body.

  ‘My wife had seen it on the news yesterday, and she mentioned over breakfast how that little girl looked like our Abbs. I hadn’t mentioned that we’d popped by the park, you see. She didn’t know we’d been there to make the connection.’

  Porter’s frustration veered away from Bruce Green, circling aimlessly now, looking for a new target. It wasn’t as if he’d knowingly wasted police time. One of those thoughts snagged on something. If that hadn’t been Libby yesterday, and the body in the park was too old to be her, that meant a slim shard of hope. At least, that’s the way Ally Hallforth would see it.

  ‘Have we done something wrong, Daddy?’ the little girl asked.

  Bruce Green gave her an awkward smile, then looked at Porter, with a face practically pleading their case, eyebrows arched in a help me out kind of way.

  ‘You and your dad have really helped by coming down here,’ he said, crouching so as to be on eye level. ‘You haven’t done anything wrong.’

  ‘Is that girl still missing?’ she asked, in that blunt yet innocent way that only kids can.

  Porter nodded. ‘She is, but we’re doing everything we can to find her.’

  She looked about as convinced as he felt, and right now, he felt as optimistic as a turkey in the run-up to Christmas. Porter thanked Green for stopping by. Bruce Green couldn’t have looked more relieved, and shepherded his daughter away, leaving Porter standing there wondering now if it truly was Libby waiting for him on the autopsy table. One way to find out.

  Doctor Isabella Jakobsdottir was a bundle of energy, squashed into a compact frame. She only came up to Porter’s shoulder if they stood side by side. Her hair was short, a pixie cut like Porter’s sister Kat used to have, and light enough that it bordered on white rather than blonde. He’d never asked her age, but guessed it was early fifties. She was a constant hive of activity, always in motion. Even now sitting on the edge of a desk finishing off her sandwich, legs swinging like a kid on a wall, a swishing sound every time they grazed against each other.

  ‘Thanks for this, Bella,’ he said, knowing full well how busy she always was.

  ‘It’s you that’ll get the dirty looks at the station for queue jumping,’ she said, wiping a speck of mayo from the corner of her mouth. ‘The living give me so much more grief than the dead. If I hadn’t done it for you, Milburn would have probably called a favour in anyway with it making the news. You know how he needs to look good for the press. He’s like a used nappy: self-absorbed and full of shit.’

  Porter laughed for what felt like the first time in days. Bella was renowned for being as blunt as a hammer to the face, but it still tickled him when she came out with little gems like that. One to share with Evie later, Styles too. Even as he thought that, he noted the order he’d thought of them in. Fringe benefit of being part of a couple again. Having someone to share the daily highs and lows.

  ‘Couldn’t possibly comment,’ he said, his broad smile showing exactly what he thought of her assessment. ‘What’s the headlines then?’ he said, tilting his head towards the door to the next room where the remains from the park lay.

  ‘Come on, let’s walk and talk,’ she said, pushing off the table, nailing the dismount like a gymnast. Her accent was a mash-up, having spent the last twenty years in London, with hints of her Icelandic inflection creeping in around the edges.

  He followed her next door, seeing the remains for the first time. A length of blue paper towel was laid out on the stainless-steel table, bones arranged so as to reassemble the skeleton. You didn’t need to be a pathologist to know they had been young when they died. Couldn’t have been more than four feet in length. He’d stood through enough autopsies, seen people sliced open the day after they died, but this was different. Sadder somehow, seeing the fragile, delicate-looking bones.

  ‘So, I’ve got a forensic anthropologist coming in to take a look later today, but the initial assessment they gave you from the scene looks right,’ she began. ‘We’re most likely looking at a young female, aged around seven or eight from the development of her teeth, see the lateral incisors,’ she said, pointing at a couple just off centre on the top and bottom rows.

  ‘Is it too soon to have a DNA match to Libby Hallforth?’ he asked.

  ‘The DNA profile should be back by the end of the day, but I don’t need that to tell you this isn’t her.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’

  ‘I could have told you that as soon as they brought her in,’ she said, folding her arms. ‘If this was Libby, there’d be much more connective tissue left, skin as well. Even accounting for where she was buried, the high moisture content in the soil, she wouldn’t have decomposed this fast in five months.’

  Porter nodded, already thinking about his next visit to Ally Hallforth, the questions she’d have. Now they knew this wasn’t her daughter, what were they doing to find her again? His worry now was that Milburn would divert resources, him included, onto the body from the park. A missing girl was all well and good, but the body of a different seve
n-year-old was all over the news, and his boss was all about the optics, the perception of the force. There was every chance that Libby could slide to the bottom of the pile, for now at least, and that didn’t sit well with him. It wasn’t Milburn that the Hallforths would look to for progress, that they’d blame for lack of it.

  ‘There’s no sign of trauma, blunt force or otherwise. No nicks or scrapes on any of the bones. We’ve got a healed transverse fracture here.’ She pointed at one of the legs. Porter could see a slight thickening around the tibia. ‘It’s an old one, though, too old to be relevant, although it might be useful down the line in helping to confirm an identity. But I do think we have a pretty good call for cause of death.’

  Porter stared hard at the remains, scanning up and down as if it should be immediately apparent. Nothing jumped out, though. She leant forwards, pointing at a small arc of bone near the base of the skull.

  ‘We’ve got an inward lateral compression fracture of the hyoid. And here,’ she said, tracing a finger along the curve, drawing his attention to a broken fragment near the top of one side, ‘you see this part, the greater horn of the hyoid has snapped, broken inwards. Points to strangulation.’

  Porter clenched his jaw to the point of grinding his teeth. Any case involving kids always brought out a similar response. It was bad enough when one adult killed another, but to be able to do that to a kid … someone who could barely mount a defence against someone twice their size, more even. For people like that, a prison cell was way too good.

  ‘OK, at least we have that, then,’ he said.